oil – Clownmommy

Self-induced Frustration

I woke up this morning to the sound of a young female grew-up-in-Montana writer being interviewed about her collection of short stories on NPR. Hey I’m a young female grew up in Montana writer. I checked her blog. In an interview she said something about making time to write everyday. I thought to myself, “Hey I’m awake and the rest are still asleep on this Sunday morning. I think I will get myself up and have some writing time.

So I got up and went into the front room where I immediately faced the pink and blue princess and new technology sugar frosted detritis of my daughter’s birthday yesterday. I started some water boiling for a quick cup of instant coffee in order to face it and to give me courage to write.

For some reason thoughts turned (I suppose because of the radio conversations’ references to Montana and college) to an awkward dinner I once while in college, lonely, and apparently socially inept. As a writer who doesn’t produce much and wonder why–I was aware with Zen-like clarity– of my movement as I jumped up to deal with the boiling water and coffee just as an image so clear and so full of potential as a short story popped into my head. And as I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my life 20 years ago–when I was young and cute and didn’t know it–in a literary fiction sort of way, my kid arouses herself and wanders through the room to the TV, which she turns on to a very loud episode of Spongebob Squarepants, lounges back against some pillows and declares that she is hungry.

I haven’t really written anything except that I remember an incident from when I was in college.

I find myself agreeing to–offering even– to make pancakes which I begin, still thinking I can satisfy my child with food and then go back to my writing –yeah right–that train has left the station;

I fill a bowl with pancake mix, oil and milk only then to discover that we are out of eggs. I pull on some clothes, inform my husband that I am going out and head to a corner market for milk, and also the Sunday Paper which I see as I am paying for the eggs.

Back home again, I make pancakes and also coffee, out of beans this time for sharing with the spouse, instead of the instant that I had made for myself. I hand deliver a cup of java to the spouse who is working now but on a laptop and still in bed so physically it feels like he is doing nothing and I am doing everything as I begin to burn the fake sausages and spill coffee beans in the soapy dish pan and try not to burn the pancakes by clinging steadfastly to my post in front of the stove while verbally mapping the location of the milk carton so my daughter can find it herself as though this were a game and she wore a blindfold.

The strong coffee and New York Times Real Estate Section make me tense and anxious as I broach the possibility of heading up to Lincoln Center to try to catch an ensemble-improvised-three-and-a-half-hour-long-French-language-theatrical-piece that was recommended by one of my clown friends who is single and lives in Manhattan.

My mind is full of the dishes in the sink and unwritten stories in my head as I apply sunscreen to myself and my offspring and follow her downstairs to act as her spotter as she practices using her new pink and black RIPSTICK on the sidewalk in front of our building. I go down quickly without keys or cellphone so when we become hot and tired and The Husband still has not come down yet we cannot stop and go up for a drink of water.

And as I write this I am backtracking because I have just lost the edits I have just made which causes me to look at the clock and think of The Husband who is now in the park with My Kid and her RIPSTICK and how I still haven’t started the breakfast dishes which is the reason I ditched them and came back up to the apartment for a few minutes instead of going to the park with them for some family time and how really it is time now to be thinking about lunch…

And the phone rings and it’s My Kid calling from the park; “Mommy where are you?”

Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

Yesterday I read Tom Robbins story, in the Village Voice, http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-11-12/columns/how-obama-s-hopesters-took-ohio/

“I just know the one thing I’m going to do today is vote,” Wagner insisted. “I’m out of a job, and even the temp agencies are cutting back on hours. I’m hoping a lot of people make the right decision today for a president who’s going to bring change.”

Beside him, Kenny Gordon, 59, a big man with a graying beard wearing a Cleveland Browns cap stood in the parking lot holding a large “Obama–Biden” sign. He said he’d been dispatched by his local chapter of the steelworkers’ union. “I’m in the mills 40 years. I swore I’d never be there as long as my father; he did 42. But I’m getting there.” After high school, Gordon worked for awhile at Steinbrenner’s shipyards before switching to steel. “Back then, you could quit one job and get another that afternoon. There were 7,500 men in my mill when I started. All the closings have taken their toll. Jesus, there are so many empty homes now. One day, I’m watching TV, and it shows these people down in Texas living under a bridge. I look, and it’s one of my old neighbors. I couldn’t believe it. He told me he was going to get a job down there in oil because he heard it was busy. He ends up living under a bridge.”

This morning on NPR I heard a feature deconstructing the musicality and timeliness of the Depression Era song, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96654742

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

I am so happy, so relieved, so hopeful. I cried. I have never felt this way about a president. One of our own. Much is being made of the color of his skin and that is an inspiring first. But this is a president of my generation. Someone who was a child in the 1970’s and came of age in the 1980’s and married in the 1990’s Someone whose children, for better or worse, are influenced by the Disney Channel.

Early 2000s recession 2001–2003 22 months
The collapse of the dot-com bubble, the September 11th attacks, and accounting scandals contributed to a relatively mild contraction in the North American economy.
Early 1990s recession 1990–1991 23 months
Industrial production and manufacturing-trade sales decreased in early 1991.
Early 1980s recession 1980–1982 25 months
The Iranian Revolution sharply increased the price of oil around the world in 1979, causing the 1979 energy crisis. This was caused by the new regime in power in Iran, which exported oil at inconsistent intervals and at a lower volume, forcing prices to go up. Tight monetary policy in the United States to control inflation lead to another recession. The changes were made largely because of inflation that was carried over from the previous decade due to the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis.
1973 Oil Crisis 1973–1975 24 months
A quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC coupled with high government spending due to the Vietnam War lead to stagflation in the United States.

The New Western Energy Show Redux

Last year My Kid joined her elementary school’s robotics team. They spent the year trying to solve alternative energy challenges using Lego’s.

As a child, I too learned about renewable sources of alternative energy –off the back of a truck:

This week, My Kid came home with a letter from her First LEGO League coach about their mission for 2008

The Project:

1.) Research how climate affects your own community. Identify a climate problem in your area, analyze climate data about the problem, and discover what your community is doing about it. Find another community somewhere in the world with the same issue and identify any solutions they are working on. Discuss the various ways climate impacts your community and your lives. Look at climate data available for your area as it relates to your climate problem. Consider talking with experts who work with or in climate everyday, like climatologists, farmers, foresters, and community leaders. Then find another community in a different geographical area that is experiencing a similar problem.

2.) Create an innovative solution based on the information you gathered that could be used on a local or even global level to solve this climate problem or improve on an existing solution. Consider all the potential solutions to your climate problem and how great an impact you can have. Talk with experts to see what solutions are already being developed or used. Build your climate connections by creating an innovative solution to your chosen climate problem that could be applied in both communities and could be adopted by even more communities who face a similar issue.

3.) Once you have researched and developed your solution, get out there and share it! Take what you’ve learned to build awareness of the problem and promote your solution. Show your research and solution and use this project to see just how great an impact you can have on your community and your world!

That’s a lot to ask of elementary school students. And yet it is the same thing they asked of us when I was in grade school. Our teachers, and TV, told us that the adults who built the factories with smokestacks that filled the air with acid rain causing pollution, and poured the sludge into the rivers that killed the fish, and the birds that ate the fish, were ignorant. They didn’t know that would happen.

So Woodsy Owl told us kids that the clean up was our job!

This year My Kid’s multidisciplinary curriculum is based around the theme of community, both local and global. The children are taught the same thing they learned watching High School Musical; “We’re all in this together”. In the spring there will be a large art project utilizing recycled materials. The students will learn how to police the glass, paper & plastic sorting skills and light bulb choices of their parents. They will sell us canvas shopping bags covered with pictures drawn in Sharpie marker of crying trees and slogans reminding us to reduce, reuse and recycle!

“Next year I am going to save the world.” My Kid said in happy anticipation, at the school festival last spring, believing this to be what one does in the third grade.

As children, we were told that the world was ours to save.

Years later my kid is being told the SAME THING because WE FAILED!

My generation was raised in the 1970’s during the Energy Crisis, in cold houses with adults fretting about the length of our showers and the high price of oil. “Could gasoline ever really go over $1 a gallon?” was one summer’s unending conversation. Yet, many of us grew up to buy SUV’s to chauffer our own kids from mall to soccer field to McMansion in suburban housing developments without any sidewalks, miles from the nearest store.

Renewable energy missionaries were out in force when I was a kid in the ’70’s:

I rode my bike to their revival meetings. I wanted to be an actress, but there wasn’t much live theater where I lived. Desperate for role models. I fell for The New Western Energy Show hook, line and sinker. It was like meeting the real life version of my Sunshine Family dolls, made by Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT)

I even had the Sunshine Family Van. I considered it one of my best Christmas presents ever! It was converted truck, with a wooden shack on top, from which the dolls apparently sold handmade pottery and leather goods at craft fairs. So you see this all seemed to me, at the time, to be an acceptable, viable, creative, even mainstream, future way of life.

But, by the time I was graduating from high school and college in the ’80’s, communal living hippie-types had turned into selfish Yuppies, and those who hadn’t were scorned. I polished my resume and wore suits in order to project a professional image. Wall Street said “Greed is good”.

Now, hipsters are getting crafty with recycled textiles, making clothes and bags to sell at flea markets and festivals, magazines and newspapers offer frugal living tips, and billboards advertise energy saving appliances.

DEJA VU!